Interior Health voices concerns over Ajax Mine application

KAMLOOPS - The Interior Health Authority has laid out concerns over the application for the proposed Ajax Mine.

In a presentation to Kamloops city council yesterday, April 26, two members of the health authority discussed concerns about the application for the potential mine. Dr. Kamran Golmohammadi, a medical health officer, and Ivor Norlin, a manager for Interior Health, raised concerns about air quality, environmental monitoring and emergency planning.

The primary concern from the health authority’s point of view is dust from the open pit mine site, Norlin said.

“There’s a lot of questions about some of the targets set, that have been set in terms of mitigation or containment of the dust,” he said.

In the application Norlin said the mine’s proponent plans for more than 90 per cent of the dust to stay on site. He said there are inherent uncertainties that go into assessing human health risks, and the air quality models used assume 90 per cent dust mitagation, which may be wrong, making the models useless.

“We hadn’t seen demonstrative evidence of that being applied somewhere else and achieved,” he noted.

Norlin said there is also concern in how the proponent outlines emergency response. While the risk for an emergency is low, Norlin says there’s no way for the risk factor to be absolutely zero.

“We didn’t feel it was spelled out as clear enough as we’d like to see it,” he said. “It should be very explicit.”

When asked about the potential of shutting down operations putting human health at risk, Golmohammadi said the health authority has shut down sites when human health was at risk, noting shut downs can happen when evidence has been presented and the source of the concern identified.

"Yes, certainly either temporarily or permanently those operations need to be stopped, and it has happened," he said

The health authority originally submitted a letter to the Environmental Assessment Office on March 3. The letter outlined some initial concerns and Norlin said they have received some information back, but haven’t gone through it all yet to see if it addresses their concerns.

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OPINION Editor, This is a busy time of year, but I find it’s also a time of reflection, particularly as January marks the end of my two-year term as Chair and my 10 years serving on the Board of Interior